As with everyone, spam has been becoming more an more of a problem every day. I’m on a Mac and have been using a combination of SpamAssassin on the server and Mac Mail’s Junk filter. It has been doing an ok job, but still a bunch of spam gets through casing me to waste time dealing with it. A couple of weeks ago I decided to install SpamSieve by C-Command Software and so far it’s been doing an amazing job. Since I started using it on a daily basis, very little spam makes it to my inbox.
When you first setup SpamSieve you’ll need to train it for a while, identifying both spam and good email, which is then logged in SpamSieve’s corpus. It’s Bayesian filter system works really well, I’ve only seen 10 false positives out of the over 13K email messages it has processed so far. It also keeps statistics on mail processing, showing the total of good and spam messages, as well as false positives and false negatives, which is great for stats junkies like myself. Other features include a whitelist, blocklist, coloring of spam messages to show degree of spamminess and the option to use of the Habeas Safelist.
Now with the combination of SpamSieve, an iPhone which does real IMAP including listing folders on the server and Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero recommendations, I’m finally in control of my email, greatly improving my overall productivity.
Related Posts:
- Spam One-Liners, Turning Spam Into Art
- Saved By Zero, The Commercial That Kills
- Whimsical Illustrations Based on Spam
- Toastvertising, Animating Toast To Promote The Book of SPAM
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Or you could use Gmail.
I’ve been using SpamSieve for 8 months now and am really happy with it. I get ~1 false positive per month and ~3 false negatives per month. Not too bad.
My only gripe is that it isn’t server-side, so when I download my mail to my Sidekick, I see all the spam.
I second all your recommendations accept the iphone. My inbox is empty and my spam is outta the way. I also added an action to my spamfolder rule to mark every message as read. When it moves the good messages to your inbox, it marks them as unread again but the number doesn’t show up next to my spam folder ( that was annoying me ).
Dude, SpamSieve is so much better than GMail as far as spam filtering goes. Granted, Gmail catches most spam, but I often get stray messages that slip through, and I almost never get that with SpamSieve. It is a shame that it is not server-side, which is both its strength (easy to use, easy to train, easy to setup) and its weakness doesn’t help when checking mail from another client.